Fiscal Fitness

On a journey to improve health and wealth!

About Me

Dido

Former academic turned accountant and financial planner.

My philosophy
Invest wisely and for the long term. Invest in yourself and not just in the market. While sometimes you need to be frugal to save funds to invest, at other times, spending more money in the short term will yield more valuable long-term results. Think about major decisions, THEN make saving for them automatic. Creating good financial habits and systems is key to success. The goal is not to die with the most money, but to live a full, meaningful, and satisfying life!

2. Take care of myself. Eat healthily (this includes an emphasis on whole foods and preparing my meals in advance), exercise consistently, sleep enough, and make time to de-stress with a daily meditation session (or two).

3. Create a peaceful and inviting home environment.

4. Reduce debt by 10.5K.

5. Maintain and expand my social life.

6. Take more and/or more frequent time off/vacations.

Debt Tracking
Not steadily downward--I left teaching in late 2009 and was underemployed for over 4 years and unemployed for 7 months of 2014, hence the upticks. I include here both mortgage debt (at $60,700 as of January 2018) and loans and credit cards. I plan to pay off the non-mortgage debt by the end of 2019, then increase the mortgage payments to pay that off by 2024 (8 years early). Also, as I get rid of the non-mortgage debt, I'd also like to start building funds in a taxable investment account, with the goal of having enough savings to cover two years of expenses post-retirement.

Half a million/birthday weekend travel

August 27th, 2018 at 10:56 am

I got a birthday present from the universe--I logged online today and for the first time ever, my net total was over 500k. Yay! That's actually 498K in retirement savings and 2K in an emergency account.

So I went away for a 2.5 day weekend Friday-Sunday for my birthday. I read Amish romances for fun and only live about 90 minutes from the area and had never visited, so I made a reservation at a nice B&B and left Friday morning.

I crammed in a lot over the weekend: several tours (a touristy farm & home tour, a private farm & home tour, a bus tour, a buggy ride, a film on the Amish, a train ride over in Strasburg, and ate a few good meals. I did a little shopping at a roadside stand where they sold yard art (got a few metal decorative pieces) and a "quillow" (small quilt that folds up into a pocket to make a pillow) and I browsed around the Bird In Hand Farmer's Market but all I bought there was some ice cream.

The best part was staying in the countryside and learning more and getting to interact with a people whom I in a way envy in their community organization and support and family lives and values-based way of living. The B&B where I stayed was on a rural road and all the neighbors within a mile are Amish, so that the B&B owners will get called upon for emergency drives (e.g., a farmer neighbor took a bad fall recently, and while the ambulance took the farmer and his wife to the hospital, the B&B owners were called upon to bring his parents to the hospital). Sunday morning I sat outside from 8 to 8:30 and saw about 15 buggies drive by as people went to church. The B&B is in the middle of 4 different church districts (a district has only 25-30 families, which can be about 250 people and since they hold church inside their barns, there's a limit and when a district gets too large, they subdivide), so the buggies were headed in different directions.

It was fun to see everything but another time I'd like to go back and just mellow out.

Today I'm off of work and catching up on chores and errands, so back to that!

(one of the chores is consolidating a couple of retirement accounts. I have two SIMPLE accounts that are no longer active from old jobs and the accounts are more than 2 years old, so the tiny one I rolled into a traditional IRA and did a Roth conversion on, and the other I'll just consolidate into my traditional IRA. gets rid of the $20 annual account fees, too!)

6 Responses to “Half a million/birthday weekend travel”

Sounds like a nice weekend. We go to a nearby town that has a lot of Amish. It is nice to see many of their wares. A friend of ours is good friends with an Amish couple and we have had dinner at their home a few times. She does this to make money. Good food and very friendly. She also sells things and my husband loves her pickled beets. Glad you could get away.